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Florida Teen Charged With Felony Hacking For Changing Desktop Wallpaper
colinneagle writes: A 14-year-old middle school student in Holiday, Florida, was arrested this week and charged with "an offense against a computer system and unauthorized access," which is a felony. The student reportedly used an administrator password to log into a teacher's computer and change the background image to a photo of two men kissing.
The student also revealed his secrets after he was caught – the password was the teacher's last name, and the teacher had typed it in in full view of the students. The student said many other students used these administrators' passwords (their teachers' last names) so they can screen-share and video chat with other students. The student was briefly held in a nearby detention center, and the county Sheriff warned that other teenagers caught doing the same thing will "face the same consequences."
The student also revealed his secrets after he was caught – the password was the teacher's last name, and the teacher had typed it in in full view of the students. The student said many other students used these administrators' passwords (their teachers' last names) so they can screen-share and video chat with other students. The student was briefly held in a nearby detention center, and the county Sheriff warned that other teenagers caught doing the same thing will "face the same consequences."
There are people who have seen this pattern and are doing something about it:
http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
I'm hoping the numbers prove that it can be expanded to the many other places where simply jailing the offender doesn't make the world a better place.
I actually had this happen to me in 7th grade. Another student realized that we could use a password cracking program (I think windows would save pw files) to crack local user account passwords. First of all this is back in the days when windows 95 had horrific security such as storing user account passwords in a file that any user could access. :P And what would happen is that when you logged into Novell windows would often then prompt you for a local user account as well. And almost everybody would type in their their regular username and password to each machine. Well the other student cracked the schools system administrator's password and it was surprise surprise his first name plus like 123.
So for the first time in known history at our school, we finally had several administrators who actually could manage the computers. We changed the desktop resolution from like 640x480 up to a "modern" 1024x768 on all of the machines. We were able to fix teacher machines which weren't working. The "system administrator" at our school's solution to everything was just format and re-install. Which is probably cost-effective for him but not ideal for teachers who would have to reinstall all of their software.
We also had a little bit of fun, using remote desktop software on friends to trick them into thinking that Microsoft Word had a sentient chat bot that they had unlocked. Or moving a file around on their desktop when they were about to click on it so they would have to chase it around.
Well the fun all came crashing down when the system administrator went on vacation and came back to notice that he had apparently "worked" throughout his vacation logging into various systems. My friend who initially cracked his password had been dumb enough to log in as himself, and then 2 seconds later as the admin, then back in as himself again. The admin perfectly sensibly went to the principle, who unfortunately though was 80 years old and completely clueless on technology. The admin filled the principle's heads with "felony hacking" and warned him that we could change our grades (We all had 4.0+ GPAs anyway so...) and also that we could change all of the accountant's books. Which might have been true but... which to me raised questions as to why the IT manager gave himself access to the entire school's accounting records. So the principle called us each in one by one. Told us (without a representative or parent) that we could either as 12 year olds consent to something like 80 hours of community service at the school over the next year or else they would press felony charges against us. We of course all started balling one by one and folded.
After that the teachers would ask us to fix their computers because they but we just had to shrug our shoulders and say "sorry, the school says if we fix your computer we'll face felony charges." Needless to say the computers returned to their shitty unmaintained state. The principle apologized to us a couple years later and said he over-reacted.
This case, the woman who got 20 years for (possibly inducing) miscarriage, the guy who built a fort from cardboard boxes in his yard for his kids and was told by the city to remove it, all in the last few days -- I think they call for this quote from Jack Tramiel (of Commodore) when he asked how he could not hate Germans after having been in Auschwitz:
"You know," he once told me, "it's hard to believe it really happened. But it can happen again. In America. Americans like to make rules, and that scares me. If you have too many rules you get locked in a system. It's the system that says this one dies and that one doesn't, not the people. That's why I don't hate the German people. Individuals, yes. Rules, yes. But not all Germans." He shrugged. "They just obeyed the rules. But that's why we need more Commodores. We need more mavericks, just so the rules don't take over."